What is reliability like?

K

kilps

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I want to know what reliability is like - I am thinking about getting iBurst but am not sure wheather or not to go for it or adsl - also i was wondering if wbs lets u have test modems / send out testers

Also with the 30 day contract can you return the modem?

Thanks :cool:
 
stones -
iBurst performance varies depending on location (basetower used), signal recieved, and entropy of the day (luck). Personally, I have had iBurst for two months now, and until 3 weeks ago, my service was atrocious.

Now, it is excellent, with sustained threaded download rates of 800kbs and above. Having a megabit is really useful, much better than 512k, you can do so much with it! Surf the internet, listen to streaming media, and transfer via ftp at the same time.

The problem is you'll likely reach the cap in half the time versus ADSL - unless you purchase more gigs, the price of which has not yet been determined.

About the refund, I don't know...
 
No downtime and no problems since early February. Forgot what sub-100KB/s looks like. And you can be up and running in 24 hours.

A lot depends on your location and signal stength.

The main pluses of ADSL would be lower latency and more stable pings.

I too can't answer the modem return question. I suspect you'd have to sell it.
 
Thanks for the advice - any idea about testers? What is it like after the cap? If i am in a good location would you recoment it over adsl? Thanks
 
If youre in a good location, i.e. Awesome Indoor Reception area, it beats ADSL 3GB anyday on price and bandwidth. NOW, to get pas the 3Gb problem, now there's a hickup of note. Maybee you should wait to see how much another GB is going to cost you. You'll be surprised at how little 3GB is.
 
I think I have either Good or fair indor (this dam mountain in Cape Town - only problem with living in Newlands - nice to look at but messes up wirless reception - even cellphone isn't great)

Is there a good free badwith monitor I can use to work out how much I use?

I understand adsl after the cap isn;t great - do you get the promised 64 kbps on iBurst? But i suppose I will be happy to sit through long donwloads at the end of the month seeing that I don;t have to pay for how long i am on
 
cap is introduced 1 april - we don't really know what it's going to be like, we can only speculate
 
i read in Shauns thread something about it mite beign delayed another two weeks ill see if i can find it again
 
well once the cap is on iBurst is a whole new monkey, right now as is, its worth every penny, after the cap is here its.. well not. With a cap in place who cares if its 1mbit and now its just gone from better than adsl to slightly worse
 
Klips.

If you got the modem from WBS you cant return it to them.
But i think if you go through a reseller you can return the modem to them.
 
kilps said:
Thanks for the advice ...... If i am in a good location would you recoment it over adsl? Thanks
Click to expand...

I've had iBurst for about three weeks now, we work with ADSL at the office. To be honest, anything that's as far as possible away from Telkom is a huge plus! I'm not just being scynical... it's an experience thing that I (we at the office and other people) had with Telkom. Something breaks with Telkom, it takes 4 days to fix... they don't realize that you have a business - or even just "online" life - to run. Something breaks with iBurst, and WBS is on it. Yes the service has not been what it could be, but remember they have not launched 100% yet.

Yes, ADSL is more stable with pings etc, but that's nowhere near something that Telkom did... that's the nature of the beast. Wireless is naturally this way... all over the world. It's what the technology do.

Personally I think Telkom is one of the #1 reasons SA can't get our of being a third world country... that ant people's attitude: People don't realize yet what standards of service are. And Telkom knows this, and uses this against us. WBS on the other hand goes the extra mile to make things better in terms of service: Helpline until 23:00 at night... Telkom people will burn strike about **** like that... :D

Anyways... back to the topic... I would go for iBurst again in a heartbeat, even though I've had my hickups & didn't expect it to be like this, but that was just because I expected a copper wire with stable pings. You get a lot more: Mobility (if you take the PCMCIA one even more mobility), Excellent Service (in comparason with Telkom), fast initial up-time (ADSL will take you at least 6 weeks to get, iBurst - 24hours at most... it took me 3 hours)

Well done iBurst (WBS)!!!! But keep on pushing te be better and better and you'll soon dominate the Southern Hemisphere.

PS: Oh ya, and Telkom is only in SA... wtf do they know about standards? WBS (iBurst) is now in Australia (1st World Country) and then off course in SA.
 
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iburst is a technology brand not a service provider, so yes the technology is in australia, and japan, but they are all licenced to different companies, and WBS is SA only, so WTF do they know about standards?
 
If you're a heavy downloader then 3GB is nothing. When I 1st got iBurst I used to download 4.2GB a day. I live in Bedfordview and the signal is excellent. I suggest you wait till Friday morning to find out about other packages & the cost per gig.

I think noone (yes noone) will let everybody know what iBurst is like after the cap.
 
i just hate the thought of being capped in one day
adsl looks much cooler now because at least local is uncapped, because with a proxy you can still access international stuff at alright speeds.
 
slimothy said:
well once the cap is on iBurst is a whole new monkey, right now as is, its worth every penny, after the cap is here its.. well not. With a cap in place who cares if its 1mbit and now its just gone from better than adsl to slightly worse
Click to expand...

I don't know why you all so negative about the cap. Not everyone out there is a power user or downloads linux distros every night. I've been on-line non-stop for nearly a week now (way above my normal usage, btw), and my meter shows 1150MB so far. Some surfing, some d/l's, some game playing, but in general for average home user I think 3GB is fairly adequate. 5GB would be better :p

Granted, no cap would be great, and that's the way it works overseas, but for now, until broadband stands firmly on it's feet in SA, I don't think capping is so bad.

On the topic of signal quality - does anyone know how WBS signal is affected by obstacles? For example, normal brick house wall - big loss of signal or not? Does moving modem close to windows make a difference? Etc.
 
3gb isn't enough no matter who you are, and to be honest its not about wether you will scrape by with 3gb or if you need 30Gb to get through the month. Here's the thing, we are years behind the world in terms of internet connectivity and that puts us in a bad place both economically and technically. Now we have broadband (and to be honest its the power users who cared enough to moan and complain to push it) but its not enough, we're still way behind. in this country 192kbit is considered a fast broadband connection, which it isn't, and now we have 1mbit connections which is OK but you need bandwith to go with it. We dont have cable and our ADSL is very limited so our only way of playing catch up with the world is wireless, now we have OK wireless solutions and awesome ones coming but now we're back to having no bandwith with them.

Its like we may as well not even have broadband with this kinda cap, we take 2 steps forward 3 steps back. So yeah, if you just use the net for light entertainment, maybe a few business emails then fine, this is ok for you, but it sucks for business. This is exactly why our internet growth is comparable to places liek afgahnastan and why internet business in SA is a scared caged little animal instead of a wild crazy murderous beast it should be.

how did WBS pull off no cap for this long? are you telling me they were leaking cash all over the place for 6 months? They were so close to being good and different so close to being that saviour we need but now they've just gone and sack slapped us all. We need a company thats not afraid to be bold and take a few steps forward and set the bar higher, WBS could have been that company but now they just want to follow telkoms lead. Telkom offers 3GB so WBS offers 3GB, so now we gotta wait for telkom to offer 10 before WBS offers 10. Do you really want telkom being the lead in this dance?

And if that doesn't piss you off let me say it this way. come april first you are going to be paying more.... for less.
 
slimothy said:
Its like we may as well not even have broadband with this kinda cap, we take 2 steps forward 3 steps back.
Click to expand...

That is simply not true. We do make small steps forward, albeit very small steps, but the progress is visible. I don't quite follow when you say "internet business in SA is a scared caged little animal instead of a wild crazy murderous beast it should be". It can't be a beast, because infrastructure is not there. Bandwidth is not there. Competition is not there, or at least not as it should be. We are a third world country, whether we like it or not, and to compare out telekom industry to the industrial giants like US or UK is meaningless. US had first telephone system about the same time when Anglo-Boer war was happening here. By the time AT&T already became a monopoly that owned telephony in US, and had to be broken up, South Africa was just getting first TV sets.

Take things with a little bit of perspective. Something like 98% of African continent never made a simple phone-call in their life, due to lack of plain phone system, never mind broadband.

Compare to 2 years ago, when pretty much everyone was on lousy 56k/b dial-up, and proper diginet leased line cost were in tens of thousands Rands, we have made a huge progress. Competition is heating up, new ISPs springing up everywhere, no-capped services, etc. Yes we will have to play catch up for years to come, no question there, but progress in the last year at least had been clear. Let's not have the defeatist attitude that everything sucks, while you're downloading at 20 times the speed that we all used to just 2 years ago ... :p
 
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